Tom Nelson points out that Michael Mann’s sabbatical gives him time to take a break from his sober, objective, apolitical, just-the-facts, hard-science-only work to discuss the environmentalist movement on:
Seems rather ho-hum until you look up what network “Inside Story” is on:
Great, maybe after appearing on Al Jazeera, he’ll be inspired to some sort of Hockey Stick Jihad. Oh, wait.
He seems desperate to me.
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestoryus2012/2012/04/201242462010275243.html
Setting aside the known primary agenda of AJE, I tried to watch this video wearing my “totally new to this issue” hat. Mann stuck to his usual big oil funded myth and martyrdom pose – as well as projecting his customary supercilious attitude (although he’s injected a new twist: “we can have a ‘good faith’ debate about solutions”).
AEI’s Kenneth Green, IMHO, was the most credible of the three participants. I don’t know what audience share AJE (or this particular program) might have, but one can hope that Green’s view prevails.
Another bright spot in the program was the observation that this year, Earth Day in the US seemed to have a dearth of participants! Perhaps the dots of the doomsters’ hype are being connected by the public in ways that leave the doomsters feeling somewhat gloomy 😉
Al Jazeera is by far the best of the mainstream news channels. It actually tends to concentrate on just what is going on without particularly having much agenda behind everything. Just because it is staffed mainly by ex BBC journalists isn’t enough of a reason to dislike the channel.
AJ for example has been instrumental in fabricating stories about bombed civilians in Libya, the same stories that have “helped” coalesce many Governments in accepting the ouster of Qaddafi.
I suspect their “agenda” is the Government’s, in their case the state of Qatar. I cannot imagine anything more remote from al-Qaeda than that. AJ has ruthlessly campaigned for “unbiased Arab news” at its beginning, then quickly hired old Western hands and became just another of the usual voices.
Little surprise in them sticking to climate orthodoxy. This is not a dark chapter in Mann’s life, rather the n-th effort by AJ to tell the world: “look, we’re like you really”.
Follow Qatar in the news to see what else they’re up with (a lot) thanks to their money and relative stability (a lot).
davidmhoffer says: “A good news source has no bias.”
Perhaps he believes in the Tooth Fairy, too. 😉 As a graduate of the world’s premier journalism school and a lifelong writer, I can assure davidmhoffer that a news source with no bias is a myth. At least al Jazeera bothered to include one skeptic on their 3-person panel; that’s far better than most US media outlets would do. And they clearly showed the dismal Earth Day turnout in DC, something again screened out by most of America’s MSM.
There’s a tendency among uninformed Americans to imagine modern Islamism as an undifferentiated bloc, off which al Qaeda is a homogeneous chip. In fact, there are many sharp divisions: al Qaeda is a sworn enemy of Shiism, Hezbollah and the Saudi government. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda parted company decades ago. Shias and Sunnis tend to detest each other. There are many shades of opinion in the Muslim world, and lumping them all together as “terrorists” is just plain ignorant.
The Muslim world is here to stay, and it is important that we learn to live with it. Al Jazeera helps.
I found Al Jazeera to be pretty fair and balanced. Certainly much better than the BBC. They tend to stick to reporting the facts without spinning everything to serve a left-wing agenda. Needless to say one should always wear ones sceptical hat when listening to their reports on Israel.
REPLY: You forget that I’m a TV Radio journalist, and I’ve spent more time in satellite feed control rooms at my TV station than I care to admit. I’ve watched hours and hours of Al-J, particularly after 9/11, but also recently as our radio station also has several satellite feeds running. So please don’t paint me with “I don’t have to watch it – or read it” when you have absolutely zero idea of my actual experience with it. My experience with it formed my opinion, so I don’t choose to watch it anymore if I can help it. – Anthony
Point taken. The first reply, at least to me, seemed to suggest you hadn’t watched it recently. I guess I encounter so much of the “I don’t don’t need to see it” attitude that I’m probably over-sensitive to that idea. I formally retract my criticism.
Though I didn’t work in the field, I hold a BA in Telecomunications – Radio, TV, Film production. For the most part, pretty much ALL broadcast news is crap! There is such a rush to be first with everything that no one bothers to take the time to gather background info before presenting a story. When they do add details, it’s not driven by the importance of the detail to the situation, but rather of the opinion and biases of the reporters presenting the story. The aftermath of the Japanese tsunami and Fukushima were a prime example. A couple of weeks into the Fukushima drama, CNN did a “Could It Happen Here?” story on the San Onofre nuclear power plant in Southern California. Wolf Blitzer was interviewing a nuclear power plant specialist via video link, asking about the risk to that plant to earthquakes. The specialist, who I’ll call San Onofre Guy, was telling Wolf that the plant was engineered to withstand at least a 7.0 directly under the plant. (I blogged this btw)
Then, Wolf automatically brings up the dreaded SAN ANDREAS FAULT!!!!
OH NO!!!!
San Onofre guy says that is not a threat and…
“But the San Andreas can produce a quake as big as the one we just witnessed in Sendai!” Blitzer interrupts.
San Onofre guy tries to explain that the San Andreas fault is many miles away, and also that they don’t build the reactors to Richter scale standards, but to Peak Ground Acceleration, measured in g’s. If the San Andreas does produce a quake of the same size, because of its distance from the plant, the motion transmitted to the reactors would be less severe than that of the closer fault.
Blitzer, apparently being an East Coast Guy and not at all familiar with either the location of the San Andreas fault, the location of it relative to the San Onofre plant, or anything having to do with seismology besides the Richter scale, asks the S.O. guy to clarify, because well…. we ALL KNOW the San Andreas produces Earthquakes as large as the one in Japan.
San Onofre guy tries to explain it to Wolf again, apparently to no avail. After the interview ends and Blitzer prepares to segue to the next story, he suggests that the S.O. guy was trying to spin him….
It was a disgusting interview. For Wolf Blitzer to suggest the guy was spinning when it was Wolfs own lack of knowledge on the subject he was supposed to be reporting on… It just pissed me off! It’s as if he did absolutely NO RESEARCH on the topic, and just led with his gut.
The recent Trayvon Martin thing was exactly the same. Everyone was reporting this and that, before really researching and gathering some real details before reporting the story. TV journalism is, for the most part, in my opinion not very well done. There is some good stuff out there, and even Blitzer or the BBC can do a good job sometimes. But I don’t have much confidence that what I hear from them is the last or most accurate word. I take it all with a pretty large grain of salt.
PS. I am a devoted listener to “The Skeptics Guide To The Universe”. It is a very good skeptics podcast… EXCEPT where AGW is involved. The IPCC is gospel and can not be wrong. Period. They bought the explanations and dodgings of the Climategate scientists hook, line, and sinker. They dutifully reported on the first half of the Heartland Institute kerfuffle in March, using all the bullet point outlined in the master memo. But when the story evolved into “Fakegate”……
Silence.
I often want to e-mail things to them on the subject of global warming, but I know they will ignore it. They dismiss any criticism, even if it has absolute validity, as “denialist propaganda”. If you’re not all in, you’re not in at all.
On the other hand
I prefer a news source that is biased, but covers the news, to one that just ignores what’s happening when it doesn’t fit what their biases. A decade ago the New York Times fit that description, but no longer.
In the old days (ask Willis when that was) you could find the teletype room at a newspaper and read dispatches right off the teletype before the editor got to them. It was fascinating how stories changed from what was posted, to what was printed. In my case, I could read the teletypes: Depeche France, Reuters, AP, UPI, Deutche Depeche Agentur, and then the newspapers: Frankfurter Allgemeine, Neue Zuercher Zeitung, Le Figaro, Financial Times, and the Paris Herald Tribune. One can only imagine the twists and turns the stories took.
Most of all, I prefer a news source that reports what’s happening without editing, but I’ve experienced only one news source that did that in my entire life. I fear that that source is slipping into the contaminated trough as well.
In sum, you can rarely believe in what you read.
davidmhoffer says: April 24, 2012 at 9:14 am
When I first read this, David, I saw ‘plank’! I think it works better that way. 🙂
I have done many interviews on AJ English. I have never been interrupted by a pushy host and have always been allowed to make my points. Unlike CNN and the dinosaur media, AJ never goes ad hominem–at least on climate change.
If you ask anyone who has interviewed with them, you are likely to hear that they in fact, while not as opulent, are much classier and professional than CNN.
bladeshearer says:
April 24, 2012 at 11:59 am
davidmhoffer says: “A good news source has no bias.”
Perhaps he believes in the Tooth Fairy, too. 😉
>>>>>>
No, I do not. As for you, your belief system seems to be that unbiased reporting is extremely hard to do, perhaps impossible, so there’s no need to try and obvious bias ought to be excused. Is that the sort of drivel they taught you in this vaunted school you graduated from? That excellence is hard to achieve so why bother to try?
And don’t lecture me about Islam and the differences between the factions. I did not say a single word about Islam, that was all you.
Doesn’t “Big Oil” fund Al Jeezera? The biggest oil companies are stated-owned corporations and many of those are in the Middle East and Islamic countries. Where do OPEC states get their money? For many, oil is the only source of revenue.
It’s stunning that some of the people of the world, actually believe a bunch of white men in white coats, who want the brown people to STERILIZE THEMSELVES for THEIR good, when those very men, have been found not even able to tell Mike Mann’s worthless scrawls weren’t math;
AND, those SAME loons, SIMULTANEOUSLY THINK, that, a TREE
is a treemometer with a thermometer built in, along with a time machine to the past.
It is downright scary when you think of how eagerly these very me would be rejoicing when third world countries’ dictators, took funds to ‘gently, equally’ apply ‘restricted population’ programs: force the opposing political parties//tribes to be STERILIZED.
The fact the tropospheric hotspot hasn’t ever appeared? These guys simply refuse to admit it shot Magic Gas down from the beginning, as does infrared astronomy’s discovery there’s LESS atmospheric infrared today than fifteen years ago.
These people will do their best to make the biggest dent in news they can, because after all: it’s not their kids who’ll see their parents take some trinkets to bring the family to the ‘clinic’ and ‘free them from worry over carbon sin’ ever again.
They’re just hideous and if you think I’m exaggerating I suggest you cruise the warmer sites and scope how many of them BLATANTLY admit: they wanna sterilize the ‘extra’ people.
20.000.000 Americans took part on the first Earth Day. I make that roughly 330,000,000 Americans who were indifferent to the fact that it it was Earth Day. That’s 94%, to the nearest whole number. Does that count as a consensus?
He’s a Mann on a mission. Unfortunately for him, AJ allowed Ken Green to talk, pretty much demolishing Mann’s message. Maybe Mann could try North Korea. They’d probably love his anti-American views.
The moment that Mr Mann opened his mouth about deniers and the fossil fuel industry he lost all credibility. Deniers are not against science. They believe that academics have sold out and abandoned scientific method.
For the people who labeled RT “professional” or “a news source”…
You know it gets ugly when they eat their own…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/apr/17/world-tomorrow-julian-assange-wikileaks
Guardian calls Assange a “useful idiot” for doing fawning interview with Hezbollah top honcho on RT…
AJ -US missile misses Al-queada and hits wrong house civilians are “murdered”. Even though in same article local witness states they must have been aiming for house full of Al-queada across street.
AJ -Al-queada car bomb blows up Iraq market and clvilians are “killed”
Not biased my lilly white …
My Arab friends say the Arab version does not equal English version of print articles. Keep that in mind. What English readers see is watered down.
Can get some information that you don’t find elsewhere and some articles are not anti-US. But, Anthony is correct. If you look at the western guest authors, they are almost exclusively whack jobs and anti-west/capitalist. AJ likes to use westerners who say the western Gov’ts are bad.
grumpyoldmanuk says:
April 24, 2012 at 12:49 pm
20.000.000 Americans took part on the first Earth Day. I make that roughly 330,000,000 Americans who were indifferent to the fact that it it was Earth Day.
———
The total population of the US on the first Earth Day, according to the census, was 203,392,031 for that year.
We seem to be getting bogged down in the AL Jazeera is this or that. Missing the point.
The point I take away from this is Prof Hockeypants will pony up to the mic of anybody whose willing to stomach his “I’m a victim” speal. He is being haphazard and reckless. Sloppy. His ego is over riding caution. Is there anybody he wouldn’t do an interview with at this point? Right how he is trying to swamp all the bad news with his own “poor pitiful me” rebutal, hoping that most people won’t see the original.
Some creative folks might use this against him. Are there not media outlets whose own reputation is so tarnished that an interview of Mike by them might tend to sully stick boy?
Is there a way we could facilitate their meeting?
Bladeshearer…What he said!
As the great Mr Gump might have said – Desperate is as desperate does.
After having watched that interview a couple times, all I can say is: “Poor deluded little Mann.”
He really, really believes this ‘stuff’ re: CAGW.
100% invested.
Owns __no__ other stock whatsoever …
.
davidmhoffer: I apologize for not making it clear that only my first paragraph referred to your claim that “a good news source has no bias.”
Every news source has a bias. It begins with the publisher’s choice of what to cover, then the reporter’s choice of what to report, then the editor’s choice of what to publish or broadcast. Bias even enters into the consumer’s choice of which channel to watch or publication to read. Biased news is like global warming – a natural fact that cannot be denied, but which becomes less dangerous if we understand it. Failing to recognize the bias in our own chosen media simply feeds ignorance.
My comment on the tendency of Americans to see political Islamism as a terrorist monolith was a general observation. We claim we believe in democracy, but object to the democratic choice of Hamas by Palestinians in Gaza, or Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt – yet neither of those entities is a friend of al Qaeda. Modern Islamism is a very complex subject, and we would do well to learn more about it.
In a surprising way this post gives evidence of a transformation in the readership of this blog. I remember in 2008-9 the overwhelming feeling of being deep in the realm of conservative america. For an old soft hippie leftie from the antipodes, it was a baptism of fire into the US hard right. Frankly it was scary. What it Lucy Skywalker? or someone bloody gutsy..they would say something slightly sympathetic to a soft leftie view of foreign policy only to be pounced on. When it happened to me too I was so surprised. I was shocked by the aggression of some of the regular readers whose views on AGW I supported.
Now will you look at the responses above! For those of you who feel quiet comfortable in the realm of the US right, there is one comfort in this transformation — there is clear evidence that in this controversy you are winning over the foreigner who see the world differently, and you are winning the lefties too.